Be Careful Who You Listen To & Know The Context

Want to hear some bad advice?

“If you are the type of soloprenuer, onepreneur or entrepreneur whatever you want to call yourself, if you’re the type of person within that particular realm that is building a business based around you, your personality, what you do, the stories you tell, the way you do things, you cannot afford in my mind right now, you cannot afford to not get active on Periscope.”

That quote is from an episode where Pat Flynn interviewed Chris Ducker about Periscope. The thing about Chris Ducker is that he’s a SUPER effective speaker, full of enthusiasm and charisma. I listened to the episode and thought, “Damn, I better get on Periscope. It’s obviously important.”

I tried a few scopes but targeting is seemingly impossible. So you end up with random people watching you. For me, one of my main goals is to keep growing the Niche Site Project email list. That goal doesn’t line up with the outcome of Periscope. I’ve heard similar things about Instagram. People hear about results from the outliers, the exception cases, and take that as proof for a typical case. Anything is possible, but you need to be realistic.

Is Chris wrong?

No. Not really, but the context is not clear. He’s so convincing that if you listen to the episode, you’ll find yourself starting a scope later that day. Seriously, the guy is good. If he was selling cars and I came in to get air in my tires, he’d be able to get me to buy a brand new car.

Anyway, Chris has been blogging for years and years. He has several venues where he’s publishing already:

Blog

Podcast

YouTube

His Book (a real, physical book)

He’s all over and has the production capability and team to repurpose content that’s already done. Proven content, that he can present again on, say, Periscope.

The key is to understand the context and understand who Chris is talking to. He’s at a level that’s way beyond most of the audience that he’s speaking to. I bet if you told him that you had limited time to blog, since it’s a side gig, and your goal was building an email list, then Chris would say you should spend time blogging not on Periscope.

One must look at the priorities and the time available and make a decision. That’s what I did. Getting someone to optin to your email list from Periscope is much harder than getting someone to optin from a blog.

Blog traffic is more targeted to the audience. A blog post can continue to bring in traffic over time. Periscope will not have that kind of pull overtime, even if it’s a evergreen topic, at least not in Periscopes current form.

So I stopped scoping after a few tries and stopped watching them too. It’s annoying to have a notification popup and there is urgency to watch someone. Periscope is an anti productivity app!